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Newsletter

What’s plain invites pattern

What’s plain invites pattern

Artistic project in Palermo, Sicily

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News

Palermo

Event

News

Palermo

Event

News

Palermo

18 - 20 September, Palermo

What’s plain invites pattern is a project that will be organized in September in Palermo, Sicily by the Alternativa Foundation from Gdańsk. Let’s meet in Palermo’s Kalsa neighborhood on the shores of the Mediterranean! The project aims at confronting selected artistic, curatorial and activist experiences currently being worked out in the post-shipyard area in Gdańsk with the needs and problems of the artistic and activist scene in Palermo, Sicily.

The project consists of artistic residencies, activities involving text and performances in city spaces, discussions of Polish and Palermo based activists, as well as lectures and film screenings. It will take place in a few locations in the city; on the one hand it is supposed
to introduce new energy into the urban space and allow passers-by to come across artistic activities, and on the other hand, to enter into relationships with the audience through workshops and meetings. Look for us on the streets, in the parks and sea promenades between 18 and 20 September.

What’s plain invites pattern is an artistic project about the performative relationship between the body, voice, place, economy and migration. Actions and events of the Polish and international artists transfer the experiences worked out during artistic activities in
the area of the Gdańsk Shipyard – mainly during the Alternativa Festival – to Palermo, Sicily. Currently the city’s activists in Palermo are trying to “recover the sea” by working with the local memory of the seashore areas, where numerous post-industrial buildings have been transformed into a Maritime Museum, culture centers and schools.

The Gdańsk Shipyard, where for years now intensive artistic operations have been taking place, is still awaiting reconstruction and the work of local activists is mainly focused on the battle to protect the material substance of the shipyard. The project wants to show the performative and research projects done by artists mainly in the medium of performance, sound, video and text installation, which adhere the city’s ‘tissue’ to our presence in it, the flow of capital and resources, people and information.

The performative actions will take place in the Kalsa neighborhood (from Arabic: “chosen”, “beautiful”) and on the waterfront. Here we also come across works by artists who work with text installations: Ewa Partum, Kader Attia, Jean-Christophe Norman, Marco Godinho and Michał Znojek running actions like guerilla gardening. We will also encounter youth working during two-week workshops with Zorka Wollny. In the public space of Palermo we will see the result of their concerted work.

The discussion will take place in the Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva, where activist groups dealing with revitalization of the Palermo port operate under the slogan “Is Palermo by the sea?”

As part of the project, at Dimora Oz - Laboratory of visual, performance and multimedia artthe, Aneta Szyłak will give a lecture entitled “Located Practice” which will aim at presenting the ways in which curatorial and artistic actions in the post-shipyard areas during the past decade have become an essential force in creating public space and the possibility for dialog between their subjects, who differ in their aims and ideas, and operate in the areas of the future Young City. It’s a form of presenting a methodology of actions, which was created as part of the process of the organization’s and people’s growing into the post shipyard areas through working with memory, history, social relations, recovering common space, creating a community which is currently formed as a curator’s work and visual research tool as part of the doctorial thesis of the lecture’s author.

As part of the project a discussion of the local and Polish activists is being prepared and moderated by Bogna Świątkowska from the Bęc Zmiana Foundation. The participants, among others, Cristina Alga, an activist from Palermo engaged in recovering the post-port areas for culture purposes to work as public spaces and access to the sea in the sense of regaining the lost, local identity in both cultural and spatial sense.

The Alternativa Foundation is a non-governmental artistic organization from Gdańsk composed of people co-creating the International Visual Arts Festival Alternativa. The team working on the execution of the project what’s plain invites pattern includes: Maks Bochenek – chief producer, Hanna Gryka – producer and coordinator and Agnieszka Kwiatek – local coordinator of the project in Palermo.

Financed by the City of Gdansk as a part of the Cultural Scholarship “Mobility Fund”.

What’s plain invites pattern is a project that will be organized in September in Palermo, Sicily by the Alternativa Foundation from Gdańsk. Let’s meet in Palermo’s Kalsa neighborhood on the shores of the Mediterranean! The project aims at confronting selected artistic, curatorial and activist experiences currently being worked out in the post-shipyard area in Gdańsk with the needs and problems of the artistic and activist scene in Palermo, Sicily.

The project consists of artistic residencies, activities involving text and performances in city spaces, discussions of Polish and Palermo based activists, as well as lectures and film screenings. It will take place in a few locations in the city; on the one hand it is supposed
to introduce new energy into the urban space and allow passers-by to come across artistic activities, and on the other hand, to enter into relationships with the audience through workshops and meetings. Look for us on the streets, in the parks and sea promenades between 18 and 20 September.

What’s plain invites pattern is an artistic project about the performative relationship between the body, voice, place, economy and migration. Actions and events of the Polish and international artists transfer the experiences worked out during artistic activities in
the area of the Gdańsk Shipyard – mainly during the Alternativa Festival – to Palermo, Sicily. Currently the city’s activists in Palermo are trying to “recover the sea” by working with the local memory of the seashore areas, where numerous post-industrial buildings have been transformed into a Maritime Museum, culture centers and schools.

The Gdańsk Shipyard, where for years now intensive artistic operations have been taking place, is still awaiting reconstruction and the work of local activists is mainly focused on the battle to protect the material substance of the shipyard. The project wants to show the performative and research projects done by artists mainly in the medium of performance, sound, video and text installation, which adhere the city’s ‘tissue’ to our presence in it, the flow of capital and resources, people and information.

The performative actions will take place in the Kalsa neighborhood (from Arabic: “chosen”, “beautiful”) and on the waterfront. Here we also come across works by artists who work with text installations: Ewa Partum, Kader Attia, Jean-Christophe Norman, Marco Godinho and Michał Znojek running actions like guerilla gardening. We will also encounter youth working during two-week workshops with Zorka Wollny. In the public space of Palermo we will see the result of their concerted work.

The discussion will take place in the Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva, where activist groups dealing with revitalization of the Palermo port operate under the slogan “Is Palermo by the sea?”

As part of the project, at Dimora Oz - Laboratory of visual, performance and multimedia art, Aneta Szyłak will give a lecture entitled “Located Practice” which will aim at presenting the ways in which curatorial and artistic actions in the post-shipyard areas during the past decade have become an essential force in creating public space and the possibility for dialog between their subjects, who differ in their aims and ideas, and operate in the areas of the future Young City. It’s a form of presenting a methodology of actions, which was created as part of the process of the organization’s and people’s growing into the post shipyard areas through working with memory, history, social relations, recovering common space, creating a community which is currently formed as a curator’s work and visual research tool as part of the doctorial thesis of the lecture’s author.

As part of the project a discussion of the local and Polish activists is being prepared and moderated by Bogna Świątkowska from the Bęc Zmiana Foundation. The participants, among others, Cristina Alga, an activist from Palermo engaged in recovering the post-port areas for culture purposes to work as public spaces and access to the sea in the sense of regaining the lost, local identity in both cultural and spatial sense.

The Alternativa Foundation is a non-governmental artistic organization from Gdańsk composed of people co-creating the International Visual Arts Festival Alternativa. The team working on the execution of the project what’s plain invites pattern includes: Maks Bochenek – chief producer, Hanna Gryka – producer and coordinator and Agnieszka Kwiatek – local coordinator of the project in Palermo.

**MICHAŁ SZLAGA, 2010 –2012, 2012, video documentation **

This work is based on materials recorded by the artist within the Gdańsk Shipyard in the last few years. The locations which are to house new investments, or new forms of production, witness endless demolition - occasionally ﬁres break out. Historic cranes, some of which date as far back as the Interbellum period, have disappeared. For almost a century, the cranes have determined the unique nature of Gdańsk’s industrial landscape.. The material tissue of the shipyard is worn out; bulldozers raze modernist halls to the ground while scrap collectors purloin historical machines. Szlaga managed to capture an entire set of demolitions.. Reminiscent of surveillance footage, the images reveal irreversible changes to the material
structure of a formerly powerful plant. Szlaga’s work constitues a direct link between the Materiality exhibition and the material and technological past of the shipyard. Usunełabym to zdanie, bo tutaj ta wystawa nic nikomu nie mówi.

**MML STUDIO, THE WORK OF MACHINES, 2012, documentation of performance **

Poland. A typical industrial town. Here begins The Work of Machines. This dance was created in 1968 to celebrate the Factory. Following the memories, it was possible to recreate the forgotten dance. This reconstruction becomes a time vehicle to the past, allowing for a trip to an era where production was supposed to mean a happy life.

The video documents an intervention in Sulaymaniyah by Hiwa K on April 18th 2011 during one of the last days of the two months long civil protest. With no international media coverage, the protest – which spread across generations, professions and cities – was brutally repressed by the police. Hiwa K plays the harmonica, with Daroon Othman playing the guitar through megaphones. The work occurred within the protest and is not a work about the protest. The title, This Lemon Tastes of Apple, refers to the use of gas against Kurdish people in Saddam Hussein’s genocide attempt in 1988 in Halabja. The gas had a smell of apple, which has since had a strong association in the political memory of the country. During the recent months of demonstrations, protesters used lemon as an immediate detoxifying agent. The work has intentionally not been translated into other languages. The words of protest remain in their own language and are not adapted to the rhetorical frames of protest elsewhere.

**stefaninaa

Józef Robakowski, The View From my window, video, 2000

Since 1970s JÓZEF ROBA­KOW­SKI regu­larly fil­med what he could obse­rve thro­ugh the kit­chen win­dow in his Łódź apart­ment. After years used the footage to edit the work „The view from my win­dow”, where the docu­men­ted grey and banal reality accom­pa­nied by the author’s com­ments trans­forms into the report on the chan­ges that hap­pe­ned to the city and Poland in the course of 20 years. Some­ti­mes the com­men­tary seems to be „objec­tive”, some­ti­mes it falls under the cate­gory of „gos­sip” but the sto­ries regar­ding what is hap­pe­ning on the squ­are out­side of the win­dow unve­ils human rela­tions and the ways of seeing of the com­mu­nist reality, the mar­tial law, com­pli­ca­tions of Polish trans­for­ma­tion, the new phe­no­me­non of con­su­me­rism and the pro­gres­sing pri­va­ti­za­tion of the public space.